btw: do you know somebody, who seriously uses hangouts? i only know whatsapp / skype people.

Afaik there are rumors, which are for example based on the fact, that their XMPP isn't useful anymore and gtalk itself is discontinued.

Google XMPP is dead. XMPP now works only with TLS and google refuses it. So its disconnected from all other servers.

xmpp and most popular? you're joking, aren't you?

Most popular (despite irc) is ICQ.

no, it's related. Think about it.

less than greater than
(slashdot eats these signs even in "plain old text" mode)

Or from math. There is more than your C(++) skills ...

What about ? Hello Pascal!

If the users need the trademark to identify your app, you already lost. Get place 1 on google and quality that distinguishes your program from the others. Then there's nothing left to fear.
Fuck trademarks, patents and other "i thought of something, now you're not allowed to think of it, too" stuff. (This does NOT include copyright, which describes the result of work instead of some thoughts everyone can have)

and with the "new" domains, we get no new names ... but every owner of a name needs to ... ... get NAME.newdomain for each domain ... try to get his own .NAME top level domain, if its a big brand.

Nothing gained. But money for new registrars.

For IT News you need to read fefe. Who doesn't?

There is no reason to make studies for something, which is clearly defined.
There is an algorithm and there are people buying ad space, which define which ads should be shown to which people. You can just ask them. About what they did and why they did it.

There are two points in your post, but they are not related at all.

1) ICANN destroys anonymity
2) people can (sometimes) ruin you with rumors.

But there is no reason, why a non-anonymous domain leads to false accusations.

maybe the ".com" = US should shift to ".us" = US?

of course they do like different agencies would like to have the internet.
ICANN should be a organization of different countries of the world, who want to create a free internet.

And Features like hello and pocket are IDEAL candidates for extensions. you can argument, if stuff like a social api should be an extenstion (then other extensions may need a dependency system), but hello can be packaged seperate without any problem. and preinstalled by default, if they want to, as long as i can disable it.